Love by Design: A documentary explores the marriage and work of Charles and Ray Eames

In the mid-1950s, where there was a stylish, modern-minded couple having a party, there was likely an Eames chair in the room. Whether the plush black leather-and-plywood lounger or the minimalist seats made from bright plastic, the modernist pieces became fixtures in the households of the chic and forward-thinking, maintaining their place as de rigueur statements in some of today’s coolest interiors.

Behind the aesthetic stood an equally stylish couple: Charles and Ray Eames, whose artistic partnership shook up both the world of design and the conventional notion of romantic collaboration. Premiering today at the IFC Center in New York and the Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills, Eames: The Architect and the Painter, narrated by James Franco, details the inner workings of the duo, bringing to life four high-flying decades during which the pair’s sensibility ruled the world of design and architecture.

Ray Kaiser and Charles Eames met in 1940 while at art school in Michigan. Eames fell in love with the dark-eyed, curious painter deeply and suddenly, and pursued her despite his marriage and the recent birth of a daughter. At the end of an exasperated courtship, Eames’s final request came in a letter. “I am 34 (almost) years old, single (again), and broke. I love you very much and would like to marry you very soon.” To this last attempt, Kaiser said yes.

The new couple set up home and shop in an apartment in Los Angeles. Their single-minded focus was learning from Charles’s prize-winning plywood chair, created with architect Eero Saarinen for a MoMA competition in 1940, and moving beyond art and into the realm of mass consumerism via new production methods. Exhaustive efforts finally led to its commercial success–with couches and furniture lines quickly following—and Eames became a household name. Emboldened by financial success, Charles and Ray went to work in a massive studio-cum-workshop in Venice, California, where his blueprints interchanged with miniature movie sets, stacks of Ray’s notes written on cigarette pack linings, and thousands of photos. From furniture to large-scale architecture projects, such as the IBM Pavilion for the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, Ray and Charles pushed creative limits by means of an unspoken bond and a playful aesthetic. The running joke remained that Charles was an architect who never finished architecture school, while Ray was a painter who never painted. In reality, every space was a canvas for Ray. While she took Charles’s projects beyond the limitations of black and white, he brought a constant stream of ideas to her work.

No place more embodied their collaboration than the couple’s Pacific Palisades home, built in 1949 as an entry in an architecture competition sponsored by Arts and Architecture magazine (for which Ray designed several covers). A secluded escape made of pre-fabricated pieces, with seventeen-foot-high ceilings, a glass and steel exterior, and Hans Hofman canvases suspended from the ceiling, the house proved an ideal setting for Vogue photo shoots—such as a 1954 story featuring a model lounging on stacked floor mats—and dinner parties that ran late into the night and showcased Ray’s quirky commitment to aesthetics above all else (for dessert she once placed bouquets of flowers in front of flabbergasted guests in lieu of cookies and cake).

As the dynamic documentary reveals, in spite of wayward flirtations, the couple complemented each other in their passion for mutating ideas and pushing artistic boundaries—no small feat in the Mad Men era of male artists and female assistants.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter, a First Run Features film by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey premieres at the IFC Center in New York and Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills.